


Brooklyn Brooklyn

by thevictorinox



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Feels, M/M, Memory Loss, Mutual Pining, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Song Lyrics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-08
Updated: 2016-11-08
Packaged: 2018-08-29 22:27:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8507899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevictorinox/pseuds/thevictorinox
Summary: “Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in,Are you aware the shape I'm in,My hands they shake my head it spins,Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in.”
Music is dangerous. Melody and chords are cloying, lyrics, mawkish. They've told him that music is dangerous because memory makes one sentimental and weak. 
This song keeps following him at his heels, and hauls him back through time. It becomes his constant companion as he chases a man he once was.





	

Music is a dangerous thing. That was why the Winter Soldier was never permitted to listen to anything other than Russian propaganda songs. It was dangerous because it would dredge up memories of a man named James Buchanan Barnes and when he started seeing times and places, he’d get dragged to reconditioning.

Sometimes he can’t help it, when he’s out on a mission, he hears the radio play in a city bodega, or a musician on the street. These days it’s pop music, and those songs all sound the same in his head, they’re safe that way, and he indulges himself by tapping his foot

Two years before Steve Rogers came out of the ice, the Winter Soldier driving through the New Mexico dessert on an assignment, he stopped at a gas station, to fill up, walking in to pay. Normally he doesn’t pay any mind to the music they play, but the soft piano and the voice cause him to freeze, as he’s staring at the packaged snack in his hand.

 

_“Load the car_ _and write the note,_  
Grab your bag and grab your coat  
Tell ones that need to know  
we are headed north.”

“STEVE! C’mon!” Bucky hollers up, hanging out of the window of his boss’ 1930 battered model A. It took months but Bucky finally convinced the man to let him take deliveries to Jersey. It means that they can spend a weekend in Atlantic City, hanging out on the beach and flirting with girls, Steve relented and agreed to go, but not without a sketchbook at pencils. Steve waves down from the window of the apartment. Two minutes later he’s hefting the blue patched up duffle into the bed of the pickup, tucking it between crates and they’re on their way.

 

There’s a sense of warm and sand on his feet that the Winter Soldier recalls as rows of metal shelving and glass-doored coolers filter back into his vision. It’s not 1938 anymore, but 2009. He doesn’t think about the memory for the rest of his assignment, he’s steadfast in keeping it out of his thoughts.

Five years later sees the fall of SHIELD as its known and the rise of HYDRA’s face. The Winter Soldier comes face to face with a man whom he was told was dead. They fight, and he saves Steve Roger’s life. He remembers the man name Bucky, and it slowly bleeds back into his memory. He hides in the Appalachian Mountains. He hears the song again out someone’s car window as gathers wood at the campground.

 

_“All one foot in and one foot back,_ __  
But it don't pay, to live like that,  
So I cut the ties and I jumped the tracks,  
For never to return.”  
  


 

He’s not going back to HYDRA. Never. He’s not the Winter Soldier anymore. He only has fractures of who Bucky is, but he’s going to try and learn more. It takes the whole song before he works up the courage to ask the girl who it’s by. She smiles, and lets him know it’s the Avett Brothers, then invites him to eat hot dogs with her friends over the campfire.

With the heat of the fire on his face, he sees the faces of the Howling Commandos through the flame, passing a canteen that wasn’t filled with water. The hulking form of Steve looking up at Bucky from across the camp through his lashes, he smiles every time he’s caught he it doesn’t stop doing it. Each time, it makes something well up in the space behind Bucky’s ribs, even now.

__  
“Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in,  
Are you aware the shape I'm in,  
My hands they shake my head it spins,  
Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in.”

Bucky only returns to New York Once. He walks around his old neighborhood. There are only a few buildings left he remembers, what hasn’t been torn down was renovated into swanky shop front of boutiques and cafes, converted into expensive apartment homes. It’s a far cry from the dirty, poor neighborhood he grew up in.

He pays in cash for a room in a hotel that charges by the hour. When Bucky was growing up, the rooms were the sort single girls would rent, with a strict house mother, no men. He remembers the woman who owned the building then and thinks about how scandalized she’d be now.

Bucky lays his head down on a lumpy pillow and sad excuse for the mattress, it’s a far cry better than anything he’s slept on in decades. His mind is a myriad of voices and images he’s only just begun to piece together. Outside the thin glass of the window, are the sounds of New York, it’s all sirens and traffic, like a lullaby he hasn’t heard in years.

 

_“When at first I learned to speak_  
I used all my words to fight  
With him and her and you and me  
Oh it's just a waste of time  
It's such a waste of time”

 

Bucky is sitting at the bar of a pub in Cork, Ireland when he hears the song next. It sounds strangely haunting with a lilt licking around the words. Careful. He thinks about the first time Bucky Barnes met Peggy Carter. It was a muddy ramshackle camp after they had been freed just the day before from HYDRA.  He knew, even then that Steve was sweet on her. The place behind his ribs felt painful when he realized the way that Steve looked at her was nothing like the way his best friend looked at him.

_“That women she’s got eyes that shine_  
Like a pair of stolen polished dimes  
She asked to dance I said it's fine  
I'll see you in the morning time.”

 

Bucky has danced with a lot of women….had danced. Before he went off to the war. He hasn’t since. He remembers dragging a skinny Steve into cramped dance halls with stifling heat and music reverberating off the walls. Steve only went because Bucky had asked. Each time, he’d catch the eye of some pretty, soft thing from across the room. He’d turn his face to Steve, looking for confirmation. The girl would eventually come over and flirt with Bucky, maybe work up the courage to ask him for the next dance.  
  
“It’s fine, Buck. Go ahead.” Steve hangs back like always, watching, head hung slightly but smiling when he catches sight of Bucky. The last time, just before he leaves for war, buttoned in olive wool, Bucky is struck with that same warmth and pain in his chest. He wishes he could pull Steve onto the dancefloor, and spin him like he does with the girls.

In the present, Bucky thinks about how different it would be to dance with Steve now.

 

_“Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in  
Are you aware the shape I'm in  
My hands they shake my head it spins  
Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in.”_  
  
_“Three words that became hard to say_  
I and love and you  
What you were then I am today  
Look at the things I do.”

Bucky once bought a prepaid cellphone when he came to Romania. Just in case. They’re still a strange thing to him, with all their functions. A far cry from the contraptions hooked into the wall with party lines and operators to connect your call. He doesn’t know much about music, but he did download a few songs. This among them. Music is a dangerous thing after all. When he’s feeling homesick for the man he was once, the person he lost when he fell off that train, he plays the song. Falls asleep to the gentle piano, and chords of the guitar in the small room of a rundown apartment.

He lets memories wind through his mind from a past he can’t reach, of a man he has no business knowing. Whom he knows is searching for him anyway. The Winter Soldier is a shattered man of crumbling concrete, being beaten down by the exhausted Bucky Barnes. Steve Rogers is the first light, shining on his face.

 

_“Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in_  
Are you aware the shape I'm in  
My hands they shake my head it spins  
Brooklyn Brooklyn take me in.”  
  
“Dumbed down and numbed my time and age  
You dreams to catch this world the cage  
The highway sets the travelers stage  
All exits look the same”

Bucky experiences a sense of cognitive dissonance in his head as he sees Steve again for the first time in two years. Half memories, have lost. Steve’s so desperate to keep him safe, holding on to the idea of a man who only exists in fractions now. He knows that it means to be the source of Steve’s protection, but he still swallows the logic down. Who is he to kill Steve’s boundless hope?

God, who is he?

Bucky feels like ripped pieces of a book he’s pasting onto himself trying to recreate the story but missing pages.  Bucky

His mind is swallowed whole by a man who speaks Russian codes, he fights and protests until all of him goes dark and he’s forced to be a passenger as his mind becomes something else. He comes alive once more, gasping for breath, more running, more fighting. He doesn’t know some of the faces he’s with but Steve trusts them, it’s all he needs. They’re in a HYDRA facility once more and it takes everything he has to be there as Steve lets go of a friend. He’s casting away Stark, and man that Bucky has discerned as friend. Steve is doing it for him, and it’s fruitless, he killed those people. He’s undeserving.

 

_“Three words that became hard to say_  
I and love and you  
I and love and you  
I and love and you.”

“Are you sure about this?” Steve wants him to say no.

“I can’t trust my own mind….” And “I think going back under is the best thing…for everybody.” Bucky swallows down the words cupped on his tongue, poised so ready to speak. This would be the time for such a confession, he doesn’t know if the world he wakes up to will have Steve in it. He doesn’t even know if he will wake up. He thinks of all the times that Steve was there for him, and the cruelty that three words can be when you are leaving someone behind. It makes it impossible.

As he leans back into the machine that will put him under, the last chords of the song waver and shake into his mind. The sad melancholy of it ending. He watches Steve through frosting glass then closes his eyes. Music can be dangerous, but in the going under, he only has the bliss of silence.  

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fic I wrote to combat my Election Day anxiety because nothing says Patriotism! Like an angsty story about unrequited love. It's not beta'd so spelling and grammar mistakes abound!


End file.
